Interviews

Elio Qoshi is the person behind ura, a fascinating design studio dedicated to improving design in free and open source projects. As part of that mission, ura works with projects of all budgets. When we talk about open source, we’re usually talking code first and then—maybe—documentation second. Design is often an after-thought. But as designers like Elio get involved in open source culture, that order could eventually change.

Dale started using Linux around 1999 when he became disconcerted with his Windows 95 computer and a young clerk in an office supply store told him about Linux. “I started reading some of the magazines, most notably Maximum Linux and eventually got to know their senior editor, Woody Hughes and Show Me the Code columnist Mae Ling Mak,” said Raby. His first distribution was Mandrake 6.5 which came in a box with a boot floppy.

Raby manages a small gun shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He is also an author with four published books: The Post-Apocalyptic Blacksmith, 777 Bon Mots for Gunslighers and Other Real Men, The Wives of Jacob I, and In the Beginning.

I think my initial fascination with Linux was based on rebuilding all my old, broken computers laying around my office/garage. I was having a ton of fun, pulling components out of old computers, installing various distros and seeing what worked/didn’t work. And then there was the 3D desktop cube, which was pretty awesome! Pretty soon I had built my kids their own computer, with “safe” web-browsing, education games, etc. It was many months of playing around with Linux before I learned about Python and started slowly getting more into the programming side of things.

When I sat down to interview Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical, I don’t think it was lost on either of us that our ability to chat freely even though I was in my office in the middle of the U.S. and she was in her office in London, England had everything to do with cloud computing, an area in which her company does brisk business.

Silber has been running Canonical (maker of Ubuntu, among a great many other software products) in one form or another for well over a decade at this point, first as COO and now CEO. She answers questions thoughtfully, with carefully chosen words; even though I’m sure I’m not the first journalist to ask her some of the below questions (maybe not even the first one this week), she had no canned responses, and she never veered off course to discuss her own agenda. There were no preset talking points; simply, I asked questions, and she answered them.

Javier Igea has been using Linux since he bought the first release of Red Hat from a book store. While he was working on his PhD in New York City, his adviser recommended that he switch from Windows to Linux. The reason for this was he was going to be doing serious numerical computations. When asked about his childhood heroes, he joked about being a little bit old. “Tarzan. Do people know about him?” He continued, “I guess I am a little old, I was born in the late 50’s.” Igea’s two favorite movies are Saving Private Ryan and Welcome to the Sticks. Javier also likes fishing for striped bass, which he describes as a strange event.

I worked as a Linux kernel developer in the areas of scheduler and power management. It was fascinating to gain a deeper understanding and contribute to development in these areas. After a while, I felt the need to gain more breadth in my understanding of computer systems. A holistic view would not only help me better contribute to Linux, but would also enable me to explore other domains in a computer system. Towards this end, I chose to pursue graduate studies in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of Carnegie Mellon University, which offers a wide range of courses in computer systems and is carrying out cutting edge research in this field too.

The Linux Foundation offers many resources for developers, users, and administrators of Linux systems, including its Linux Certification Program. This program is designed to give you a way to differentiate yourself in a job market that's hungry for your skills.

To illustrate how well these certifications prepare you for the real world, this series features some of those who have recently passed the certification exams. These testimonials should help you decide if either the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) or the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) certification is right for you. In this installment, we talk with LFCS Lorenzo Paglia.

Do you love Microsoft? Dr. Roy Schestowitz doesn’t. He also led a “Boycott Novell” movement back when there was a Novell to boycott, and he has crusaded against other tech companies, especially regarding software patents. It is, as they say, “Clean indoor work, but somebody has to do it.” And Roy is that somebody.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.